The Evasions of the 53 Percent: This Time It’s Personal

The conservative movement believes it’s unfair to make rich people pay higher tax rates than others, and it has made this belief the central precept of the Republican agenda. The problem is that it’s not a popular belief — most Americans, even a majority of Republicans, favor higher taxes on the rich. So the movement characteristically engages in a series of evasions, designed to exaggerate the relative burden paid by the rich and downplay the burden upon the non-rich, rather than to defend conservatives’ actualbeliefs.

That was the point of my piece from a couple days ago. A couple responses I’ve seen from conservatives further prove mypoint.

National Review blogger Reihan Salam, a former colleague at the New Republic, is a very smart guy who writes lots of interesting things (most recently here), but has an unfortunate habit of defending silly yet influential Republican arguments by consciously ignoring them. In keeping with this method, he does not attempt to defend the pervasive, misleading claims about the tax burden that were the subject of my piece. Instead, in response to me, he offers up scattered musings of tenuousrelevance.

Let me pluck out the points of quasi-relevance. Reihan critiques the pertinence of mydata:

Raising taxes would presumably have no income on market income inequality. Rather, it would have some small impact on post-tax inequality. This is one reason why we tend to look to post-tax-and-transfer inequality to get a good understanding of the shape of the economy. Yet we’re presented with charts showing average household income before taxes.

Here is the chart Iposted:

If Reihan will turn his head ever so slightly to the right, he will see that I did in fact post a chart showing the rise in after-tax income inequality. In any case, I don’t see the point of his objection, even if I hadn’t. Surely the fact that the rich have taken home virtually all the income gains of the last three decades has some bearing on the question of how to allocate the taxburden.

I argued that “Deficit reduction is (or is, at least, very close to) a zero-sum resource-allocation question.” Reihan replies by citing the possibility that the government might find ways to do more with less. That’s perfectly swell. Every president has tried it, none have enjoyed more than slight success, but maybe we can do better. But there’s no way to close the long-term deficit just by making government do more with less. Therefore, we’re back to the zero-sum resource allocation question — lower taxes for the rich means more cuts in other things. You can argue that lower taxes for the rich and lower Medicare benefits beats higher taxes for the rich and higher benefits, but you can’t wave the magic wand of more efficient government to make the questiondisappear.

Reihan also describes raising taxes on the rich as “raising marginal tax rates.” In fact, President Obama’s proposal would not touch their marginal tax rates, but would instead reduce the value of their deductions. This error seems symptomatic of his desire to engage with imaginary arguments rather than the ones actually being put before thecountry.

Chait attempts to answer this question with a dubious study from the Center for Tax Justice purporting to show that the highest-earning 1 percent take home 20 percent of the national income and pay 21 percent of the total taxes. The CTJ study is based on a model which claims to factor in all state and local taxes in addition to federal ones. Using these numbers in a debate over federal taxes is highly misleading.

So he thinks the CTJ computation of the total federal, state, and local tax burden is “dubious” and “misleading.” But why? Carroll doesn’t argue that it’s inaccurate. He merely thinks it’s somehow wrong to consider the impact of local and statetaxes.

I’m relieved to finally find a conservative willing to openly say that we should make federal tax policy without any regard to the impact of state and local taxes. But Carroll offers no support for this idea, and it seems like a strange one. Suppose state and localities raised their revenue entirely from the very rich, the federal taxes were flat, or slightly regressive, and liberals complained that the rich were getting off easy. Wouldn’t the fact that the rich would be getting socked on their state and local taxes have some relevance? Is it really crazy to formulate a view with regards to how much different groups should pay to the government as a whole?

I’m inferring Carroll thinks the burden of state and local taxes, which falls more heavily on the poor than the rich, has nothing to do with the burden of federal taxes. Therefore we have to think about the distribution of federal taxes without taking state and local taxes into account. It would seem to follow that the reverse must be true — we have to consider state and local taxes on their own, without taking into account the impact of federal taxes. Does Carroll think it’s unfair that these taxes are so regressive, then? Should state and local governments cut taxes on the poor and raise them on therich?

I doubt he believes any of these things, or has even given much thought to the question. It’s simply another case of tossing anything against the wall to avoid the question athand.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, uses an unofficial online messaging service for official White House business, including with foreign contacts, his lawyer told the House Oversight Committee late last year.

The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he was not aware if Mr. Kushner had communicated classified information on the service, WhatsApp, and said that because he took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee said that he was investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration, including Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested for months.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to stop disparaging the late Sen. John McCain, calling the Vietnam war hero “a dear friend” and defending him against the president’s criticisms. …

Ernst’s remarks came during a town hall meeting at a high school in Adel, Iowa, where several attendees voiced anger about Trump’s attacks about McCain. One attendee described McCain as a “genuine war hero” and called Trump’s comments about McCain “cowardly.”

“I do not appreciate his tweets,” Ernst said, when pressed by the attendee why she didn’t previously speak out more forcefully. “John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no I don’t agree with President Trump and he does need to stop.”

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.